Tuesday, 12 November 2013

On Saturday, the 26th of October the
Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic participated in the University of
Cambridge's Festival of Ideas, an event held annually since 2008 designed to
encourage the community and anyone with an interest in Cambridge’s work and
research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, to come over, check us
out and meet the faculty and students.

Several
events were held within our department on the Saturday, with two well-attended
lectures by faculty members Dr Richard Dance and Prof Simon Keynes, speaking on
‘Frontiers in Anglo-Saxon England’, on the Tuesday following.The majority of Saturday's events, organized
under the theme ‘Beyond Borders: Exploring the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic
Worlds’, were run by graduate students, led by Christine Voth.Upstairs in the department itself, attendees
could enjoy a re-enactment of Groenlendinga saga, have a look at the work being
carried out by the Orkney Project, or, for the young (and young at heart),
there was a colouring session where future ASNCs were invited to hone their
artistic skills with a variety of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic art, or to try
their hand at the runic and Ogham scripts.

Downstairs
we were happy to present two brief lectures.The first was a discussion of the Otherworld in Celtic mythology and
literature, including a dramatic retelling, in English and Welsh, of a tale
from the Mabinogion, a celebrated collection of Medieval Welsh prose
texts.The second lecture was an
exploration and appreciation of the importance of borders and marginalia in a
selection of medieval manuscripts originating from each of the cultures covered
by our research.

Running
concurrently with the lectures was a poster session, encompassing a wide
variety of topics within the fields covered by ASNC, where attendees of the
Festival were welcome to browse at their leisure.Use of the English Faculty Library’s iPad,
generously loaned for the occasion, to explore high-resolution digital images
of manuscripts was a popular feature of this session, and was helpful in
demonstrating the increasing value of new technology in the study of medieval
artifacts.

It’s
not every day that we get to share our enthusiasm in our research with the
general public, so we hope to see the Festival of Ideas continue to celebrate
the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for many years to come!

Wednesday, 6 November 2013

On Monday 28th October ASNaC was treated to a visit by Immo Warntjes, Lecturer in Irish Medieval History at Queen’s University, Belfast. Immo
originally worked as a postgraduate researcher in the Foundations of
Irish Culture Project at the National University of Ireland, Galway,
where he also completed his Ph.D. under Professor
Dáibhí Ó Cróinín in 2007. Immo’s primary field of interest is early medieval scientific
thought but he is probably best known for his work in the field of
computus (medieval time-reckoning). His PhD thesis later became his
monograph and is published as The Munich Computus: Text &
Translation. Irish computistics between Isidore of Seville and the
Venerable Bede and its reception in Carolingian times (Stuttgart:
Steiner 2010). In addition to this work, Immo has also been extensively
involved with the International Conference on the Science of Computus
which happens every two years in Galway (next one in 2014)

Immo
kindly spent last Monday in the department where he met with members of
staff and graduate students and his day culminated in a paper for the
ASNC graduate seminar entitled 'Willibrord the computist: harbinger of
the Carolingian renaissance?'. The paper provided significant food for
thought and argued quite convincingly that the 7th century
missionary saint Willibrord had a much more far reaching influence on
the study and application of medieval European computistics than had
previously been thought.

There
are a number of ASNC post-graduate students who are either working
directly in the field of medieval computus or in fields that are allied
to it. Computus is an area that is under-researched and there is a
general dearth of workshops, courses and scholarly material outside of
original manuscript sources. It was therefore very kind of Immo to run a
two hour computus workshop on the Monday morning (thoughtfully arranged
by Dr Rosalind Love) and this was well attended by some twenty students
from the faculty. During the workshop Immo discussed the ‘Easter
Controversy’ which had occupied the thoughts and minds of the early
church fathers and is something that, even today, gives rise to
disagreement. Immo also discussed the basis for the calculation of the
date of Easter and the differences between Roman and Celtic
computistical methods. Latin terminology and manuscript evidence was
presented along with relevant historical background. The workshop was
extremely enjoyable and highly interactive with lots of opportunities
for students to participate. Immo introduced the various types of Easter
tables (Celtic and Roman) focusing on differences with interpretation
and calculation in a session which was highly informative and provided a
significant amount of useful information. Immo came to medieval
studies with a background in mathematics and he has an impressive amount
of experience in the area of computistics. His delivery and content was
both clear and concise as well as engaging, incisive, and directly
relevant to graduate study.

After
the workshop a number of ASNC graduates agreed together that a
‘self-help’ workshop focused on working through and interpreting
computistical tables would be an extremely useful extension to Immo’s
session and something along these lines will be arranged separately. If
you would be interested in attending and/or contributing to such a
workshop please ask to be added to Tony Harris’s Facebook group on
Medieval Computus.

About Me

This blog is written and maintained by members of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge. We study the history, languages, literatures and material culture of medieval Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia.
For more information about us go to: http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk